Cote: Spoiled Miami Heat fans should embrace struggle of rare down season and cheer the fight | Opinion
Wait. What? The forlorn, beaten, maligned, written-off Miami Heat had one of its best games of the season on Wednesday night? No way.
Heat fans must have been so, so disappointed.
Not all of them, of course. Just the good many who seem to delight in complaining and grousing. (Heat fans led the NBA in grousing until being bumped when Dallas traded Luka Doncic — the most notorious deal in sports history at least since the day after Christmas 1919 when the Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees to help finance the owner’s musical, “No, No, Nanette”.)
The Heat is 27-30 today and the spoiled, entitled wing of the fandom act as if the record is 17-40. To hear and see the vitriol on social media you would think we inherited the Washington Wizards. Looking for a landing spot for their outrage because Miami dares to struggle through a rare down season, Heat fans have gone to the usual place (game has passed Pat Riley by) but also invented a new one: Erik Spoelstra has lost his mojo!
Nah, what happened was, disgruntled star Jimmy Butler pouted his way out of town and is presently the golden guy in Golden State, having found his “joy” again after quitting on the city of Miami, the Heat, the fans and the integrity of basketball by openly not playing hard.
The tumult sucked the life out of the season.
Riley is not faultless. You can blame him for not trading Butler earlier. I have said and written for a few years, even when Miami got to the Finals in ‘23, that a team with Butler as its best player won’t win a championship. Riley was slow to see that Butler, Bam Adebayo and Tyler Herro was a solid trio but not a championship one.
Spoelstra was left to deal with all of the Butler drama and fallout and to incorporate the players here in return (Andrew Wiggins, Davion Mitchell, Kyle Anderson) and do it on the fly in the midst of a brutally long stretch of mostly road games.
I might argue not that Spoelstra has lost his mojo, but that this is among his most challenging seasons and one of his better coaching jobs, given everything.
Heat fans need to be made to spend a year in Dolphins colors and experience what it feels like to be a fan of a franchise that hasn’t won a championship in 52 years. Or be made to sit at an empty Marlins ballpark this year and watch a team full of prospects lose because the cheapskate owner won’t spend on actual big-leaguers.
Consider, for broad perspective, the track record of playoff appearances by our four longest-standing pro franchises:
▪ Heat: .703 (26 playoffs in 37 seasons if they make it this year, which is likely. And three NBA titles in seven Finals).
▪ Dolphins: .424 (25 playoffs in 59 seasons With two championships in four Super Bowls).
▪ Panthers: .355 (11 playoffs in 31 years if they make it in ‘25, which is all but certain. And one title in three Stanley Cup Finals).
▪ Marlins: .125 (Four playoffs in 32 seasons. With two championships in two World Series).
The Florida Panthers are flying high and rightly the market darling at the moment, but year in year out since their birth in the late ‘80s the Heat has set the standard for winning in South Florida — and not abdicated that this season even among their struggles.
Miami presently is in play-in tournament purgatory but — having begun a stretch of nine of 10 and 14 of 17 games at home — certainly will have the chance to rise into the Eastern Conference’s top six and avoid the play-in.
A bigger test comes Friday at home vs. Indiana, but what we saw Wednesday to end a 1-6 skid could serve as a spark. The Heat hit 23 3’s, one short of a club record. Herro, Adebayo, Mitchell and Duncan Robinson off the bench all topped 20 points. Miami shot a season-best 59 percent.
(Guess Spo found his missing mojo hidden in the sock drawer?)
I won’t apologize for a positive spin column on this Heat team and season, if only as an antidote to the extreme pall that has hung over it, put there by fans beside themselves to handle a down year because this franchise has had so few.
Herro, Adebayo, Wiggins and Mitchell are a stout quartet to build on, to add to. Kel’el Ware is presently top-three in rookie of the year odds.
But I won’t sugar-coat the state of the Heat, either. Riley has work to do. The club president will turn 80 on March 20, and it is fair to wonder if the godfather has one last hurrah in him — one more whale, one more parade down Biscayne Boulevard. The whale-hunting has been sketchy of late. Damion Lillard wanted to come to Miami but the Heat couldn’t pull it off. Will the speculation about Giannis Antetokounmpo turn into anything? The dalliances with Kevin Durant have borne no fruit, but another run at him could come this summer with Phoenix expected to trade him. Durant paired with Adebayo and Herro would entice, and Miami has draft picks and the combined salaries of Wiggins and Terry Rozier to equal Durant’s.
The Heat must do something seismic because the team has seen itself lapped in the East not only by the champion Celtics but also by the suddenly excellent Cavaliers and by the traditional-rival Knicks and others.
There is much climbing to do. Post-Butler, the Heat is right now without a bona fide superstar for the first time since the early 2000s, pre-Dwyane Wade.
Riley must marshal the powers that made him a Miami legend and work a deal to deliver another superstar and provide Spoelstra the firepower to compete again in the stacked East.
Meantime the Heat is today what is never was under Alonzo Mourning, Wade, Shaquille O’Neal, Chris Bosh, LeBron James or Butler before he quit trying.
The Heat is the underdog, struggling to rise above mediocrity in a season unusually wrought with turmoil. Struggling through its deficiencies, and injuries, and its own fans’ disappointment and doubts.
There is nobility in the climb, the challenge, the struggle. It is a fight worth cheering.
This story was originally published February 27, 2025 at 12:32 PM.
